¬¬Our title, "Big Booze is Slowly, Softly, Killing Women," reflects a theme of the book. We assert that the alcohol beverage industries are actively, knowingly promoting unhealthy products. Although these products when taken in moderate amounts are not particularly toxic, they are more toxic to women than men. This book details why that is the case. Recently, Big Booze has begun marketing practices that are clearly designed to encourage young women to buy more of their products. They do this knowing that enhanced intake of their beverages is likely to harm women. This situation can be grave. Intake of products like dessert-flavored alcoholic beverages encourages more intake than is healthy. Excessive intake can clearly lead to serious diseases that might be fatal. Therefore, we came to the conclusion that Big Booze is Slowly, Softly engaging in practices that new data indicates induce serious disease, even fatal disease. For example, for the first time in history, numbers of women in their second and third decade of life are dying of cirrhosis of the liver induced by alcoholic beverages. There was a time in America when it was socially unacceptable for women to drink alcoholic beverages and surely unacceptable for them to appear drunk. Now, it is clearly more acceptable for women to drink, appear tipsy, and have fun enhanced by alcohol. It is now a mark of social sophistication for women to be avid consumers of alcoholic beverages. The book details how it has come to pass that over the years there has been this marked change in the society. This new acceptability has been the product of careful, scientifically derived advertisements and public relations by Big Booze. Further, these new marketing techniques are specifically designed to encourage young women to drink and to continue to buy Big Booze's products. Consequently, we now have more young women who are drinking more and more and becoming alcoholics. Given that those who have developed an addiction to alcoholic beverage have a marked propensity to consume large amounts of those beverages for long periods, the result is a wide array of diseases including liver disease and reduced cognitive functioning. The net effect of large proportions of the adult female population drinking excessively is that more mothers and grandmothers are less capable of performing the same valuable contributions to societies as their mothers and grandmothers did.
About the Author: The author of this book is Professor Larry D. Reid. It is co-authored by a longtime collaborator, Meta L. Reid. Larry has been teaching a course on alcohol, drugs, and behavior for over 40 years at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. For many of those years, he was director of a laboratory studying the effect of addictive drugs, including alcoholic beverages. An interim summary of progress toward understanding the addictive process was published in 1990 in a book that provides the written material from a symposium at a Society of Neuroscience meeting. This book was edited by Professor Reid who co-authored many of its chapters. The edited book provides the scientific basis for the first new medicine developed in 50 years to treat alcoholism. The chapter describing the results of the first clinical trial of that new medicine was by a team of scientists led by the distinguished psychiatrist Dr. Charles P. O'Brien and a young physician Dr. Joseph R. Volpicelli. The drug in question is the opioid antagonist naltrexone. Also, the edited book provided the scientific basis for why naltrexone may be an effective medicine in the treatment of bulimia. There are also chapters describing naltrexone in the treatment of bulimia. Hence the title of the book became "Opioids, Bulimia and Alcohol Abuse & Alcoholism." Subsequent to the publication of "Opioids, Bulimia and Alcohol Abuse & Alcoholism," there has been considerable new information on the issue of women and alcoholism. Some of the new information is provided in Professor Reid's book "Women, Alcoholism, and Feminism" published in 2013. This book is an updated version of Professor Reid's book on women and alcoholism and was written specifically for young women and the people who love them.